2014 Award Winner Madeline Lancaster

Appointment at time of winning the Award
Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Laboratory of Juergen Knoblich, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA), Vienna, Austria

Modeling human brain size regulation in cerebral organoids
The human brain exhibits dramatic evolutionary and developmental expansion, a process that has been difficult to examine in traditional animal models. In order to gain insight into this uniquely human  process, my work focuses on the use of a 3D in vitro model system of human brain development, termed cerebral organoids, to examine regulators of brain size in the context of human evolution and neurodevelopmental disease.